How To Start With Dip Pens?

[AAAndrew]

I wouldn’t recommend the spit technique, especially with vintage nibs. The older nibs used all kinds of fun stuff in the coating over the bare Steel to prevent rusting, like mercury.

 

And no need to waste good vodka, plain rubbing alcohol will work for many pens. The alcohol dissolves the shellac that some pens put on as a final coating.

 

The potato technique has quite venerable precedents. They used a slice of potato at their desks in German counting houses in the 19th-Century.

 

You can wipe on the saliva, if you wish. I don’t recommend leaving ink to dry on your nib. You can use some iron gall fountain pen ink, like ESSRI, Diamine registrar, Salix or a number of others. These work great, and seem to help other inks then work slightly better.

 

I have to write up some of his standard advice on my blog. That way I can just point to that. A lot is already written here on FPN. Search and you will find. Look for the key word “potato”

[Plumette]

Wow, so much information!!!

 

I used some old dip pen holders and nibs of my mother's, decades ago, to teach myself calligraphy, and I don't remember having any trouble getting them to write. They probably had a good patina, which I in my teenage innocence knew nothing about.

 

Then I bought a quill pen souvenir box at the Smithsonian a year or so ago, with several sizes of nib and an extra wooden pen holder, and I couldn't get it to write for anything. My daughter brought me back another quill pen from Italy this summer and it was no better. I thought it was pilot error, but I didn't know what the pilot could do to keep them pen from writing a big blobby line for a few words, then a normal line, then a tiny scratch, and then running out of ink on the seventh or eighth word.

 

So I turned to my friends at the Fountain Pen Nuthouse. I ran the nibs through a flame briefly, then sucked on the cooled nibs for a second, and then did the dip-and-dry thing. Or dip-and-sorta-dry. They write much better now (and, for the record, I like the Smithsonian nibs better than the Italian one). Now the ink is less blobby and I can get maybe a line and a half or two lines out of one fill. If they need more work, I'm breaking out the vodka and a potato. Hmm, and vodka has occasionally been distilled from potatoes...coincidence?

[corgicoupe]

Look at TheSteelPen.com for an alternative answer, and the reason you had the problem

[sidthecat]

I learned to use dip pens when I was in high school...maybe earlier. I used them for drawing, and when I got into art school it gave me a slight advantage in a couple of my classes because I wasn't afraid of ink. Some of my fellow students weren't used to the permanence of their drawn line. I used Hunt crow quills and Speedball spoons, but writing with them wasn't an idea until many decades later.